Swan Peak Read Free

Purcel,” the driver said.
    “Are you serious?” Clete said.
    “You’re on the Wellstone Ranch,” the driver said. “We can have you arrested for trespassing, or you can let us do our job and look in your car. You didn’t have situations like this when you worked security at Tahoe?”
    Clete blinked, then pointed his finger. “You were a driver for Sally Dio.”
    “I was a driver for the car service he used. Too bad he got splattered in that plane accident.”
    “Yeah, a great national tragedy. I heard they flew the flag at half-mast for two minutes in Palermo,” Clete said. He glanced at the black-haired man, who had just retrieved a tool from the truck and was walking back toward Clete’s Caddy with it. “Tell your man there if he sticks that Slim Jim in my door, I’m going to jam it up his cheeks.”
    “Whoa, Quince,” the driver said. “We’re going to accept Mr. Purcel’s word. He’ll clean up his camp and be gone—” He paused and looked thoughtfully at Clete. “What, five or ten minutes, Mr. Purcel?”
    Clete cleared an obstruction in his windpipe. He poured his coffee on his fire. “Yeah, I can do that,” he said.
    “So, see you around,” the driver said.
    “I didn’t get your name.”
    “I didn’t give it. But it’s Lyle Hobbs. That ring any bells for you?”
    Clete kept his expression flat, his eyes empty. “My memory isn’t what it used to be.”
    The man who had introduced himself as Lyle Hobbs stepped closer to Clete, his head tilting sideways. “You trying to pull on my crank?”
    Clete set his tin coffee cup on the rock next to his Fenwick and slipped his hands into the back pockets of his jeans, as a third-base coach might. Don’t say anything , he told himself.
    “You don’t hide your thoughts too good,” the driver said. “You got one of those psychodrama faces. People can read everything that’s in it. You ought to be an actor.”
    “You were up on a molestation charge. You did a county stint on it,” Clete said. “The girl was thirteen. She recanted her statement eventually, and you went back to driving for Sally Dee.”
    “You got a good memory. It was a bum beef from the jump. I got in the sack with the wrong lady blackjack dealer. Hell hath no fury, know what I mean? But I didn’t drive for Sally Dee. I drove for the service he contracted.”
    “Yeah, you bet,” Clete replied, his eyes focused on neutral space.
    “Have a good day,” Lyle Hobbs said. His head was still tilted sideways, his grin still in place. His impaired eye seemed to have the opaqueness and density of a lead rifle ball.
    “Same to you,” Clete said. He began to take down his tent and fold it into a neat square while the two visitors to his camp backed their truck around. The back of his neck was hot, his mouth dry, his blood pounding in his ears and wrists. Walk away, walk away, walk away , a voice in his head said. He heard the oversize truck tires crunch on the rocks, then the steel bumper scrape across stone. He turned around in time to see one wheel roll over his Fenwick rod and grind the graphite shanks and the lightweight perforated reel and the aluminum guides and the double-tapered floating line into a pack rat’s nest.
    “You did that deliberately,” Clete said, rising to his feet.
    “Didn’t see it, Scout’s honor,” the driver said. “I saw them comb Sally Dee and his crew out of the trees. The whole bunch looked like pulled pork somebody had dropped into a fire. You’re a swinging dick, big man. Public campground is five miles south. Catch a fat one.”
     

CHAPTER 2
     
    CLETE AND MY wife, Molly, and I had come to western Montana at the invitation of a friend by the name of Albert Hollister. Albert was a novelist and retired English professor who lived up a valley off the state road that ascended over Lolo Pass into Idaho. He was an eccentric, a gadfly, and in most ways a gentle soul. Unbeknownst to his colleagues, he had served time on a road gang in Florida